India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  There was a wooden shed in my father's small garden where I kept rabbits and a tame raven. There I spent endless hours, long as geological ages, in warmth and blissful ownership; the rabbits smelled of life, of grass and milk, of blood and procreation; and in the raven's hard, black eye shone the lamp of eternal life. In the same place I spent other endless epochs in the evenings, beside a guttering candle with the warm, sleeping animals, alone or in the company of a friend, and sketched out plans for discovering immense treasures, finding the mandrake root and launching victorious crusades throughout the world, which was so much in need of deliverance, crusades on which I would execute robbers, free miserable captives, raze thieves' strongholds, have traitors crucified, forgive runaway vassals, win kings' daughters, and understand the language of animals.

  There was an enormously big heavy book in my grandfather's large library; I often looked through it and read here and there. This inexhaustible book contained marvelous old pictures— sometimes you could find them when you first opened the book and leafed about, there they were bright and inviting; sometimes you could search for a long time and not find them at all, they were gone, magicked away as though they had never existed. There was a story in this book, exceedingly beautiful and incomprehensible, that I read again and again. It too was not always to be found, the hour had to be favorable, often it had completely disappeared and would keep itself hidden, often it seemed as though it had changed its residence and address; sometimes when you read it, it was strangely friendly and almost understandable, at other times it was all dark and forbidding like the door in the attic behind which at times in the twilight you could hear ghosts chattering or groaning. Everything was full of reality and everything was full of magic, the two grew confidently side by side, both of them belonged to me.

  Then too the dancing idol from India which stood in my grandfather's fabulous glass cabinet was not always the same idol, did not always have the same face, did not dance the same dance at all hours. Sometimes he was an idol, a strange and rather droll figure such as are made and worshipped in strange, incomprehensible countries by strange and incomprehensible people. At other times he was a magical object, full of meaning, infinitely sinister, avid for sacrifices, malevolent, harsh, unreliable, sardonic—he seemed to be tempting me to laugh at him in order afterward to take vengeance on me. He could change his expression although he was made of yellow metal; sometimes he leered. Again at other times he was all symbol, was neither ugly nor beautiful, neither evil nor good, laughable nor frightful, but simply old and inscrutable as a rune, as a lichen on a rock, as the lines on a pebble, and behind his form, behind his face and image, lived God, the Infinite lurked there, which at that time as a boy, without knowing its name, I recognized and revered not less than in later days when I called it Shiva, Vishnu, named it God, Life, Brahman, Atman, Tao, or Eternal Mother. It was father, was mother, it was woman and man, sun and moon.

  And around the idol in the glass cabinet and in other of Grandfather's cabinets stood and hung and lay many other beings and objects, strings of wooden beads like rosaries, rolls of palm leaves inscribed with ancient Hindu writing, turtles carved out of green soapstone, little images of God made of wood, of glass, of quartz, of clay, embroidered silk and linen covers, brass cups and bowls, and all this came from India and from Ceylon, from Paradise Island with its fern trees and palmlined shores and gentle doe-eyed Singhalese, it came from Siam and from Burma, and everything smelled of the sea, of spice and far places, of cinnamon and sandalwood, all had passed through brown and yellow hands, been drenched by tropic rains and Ganges water, dried by the equatorial sun, shaded by primeval forests. All these things belonged to my grandfather, and he, the ancient, venerable, and powerful one with the white beard, omniscient, mightier than any father and mother, he possessed other things and powers as well, his were not only the Hindu idols and toys, all the carved, painted, magically endowed objects, the coconut-shell cups and sandalwood chests, the hall and the library, he was a magician too, a wise man, a sage. He understood all the languages of mankind, more than thirty, perhaps the language of the gods as well, perhaps that of the stars, he could write and speak Pali and Sanskrit, he could sing the songs of the Kanarese, of Bengal, Hindustan, Senegal, he knew the religious exercises of the Mohammedans and the Buddhists though he was a Christian and believed in the triune God; for many years and decades he had lived in hot, dangerous, Oriental countries, had traveled in boats and in oxcarts, on horses and donkeys, no one knew as well as he that our city and our country were only a very small part of the earth, that a thousand million people had other beliefs than ours, other customs, languages, skin colors, other gods, virtues, and vices. I loved him, honored him, and feared him, from him I expected everything, to him I attributed everything, from him and his god Pan disguised in the likeness of an idol I learned unceasingly. This man, my mother's father, was hidden in a forest of mysteries, just as his face was hidden in the white forest of his beard; from his eyes there flowed sorrow for the world and there also flowed blithe wisdom, as the case might be, lonely wisdom and divine roguishness; people from many lands knew him, visited and honored him, talked to him in English, French, Indian, Italian, Malayan and went off after long conversations leaving no clue to their identity, perhaps his friends, perhaps his emissaries, perhaps his servants, his agents. From him, from this unfathomable one, I knew, came the secret that surrounded my mother, the secret, age-old mystery, and she too had been in India for a long time, she too could speak and sing in Malayan and Kanarese, she exchanged phrases and maxims with her aged father in strange, magical tongues. And at times she possessed, like him, the stranger's smile, the veiled smile of wisdom.

  My father was different. He stood alone, belonging neither to the world of the idols and of my grandfather nor to the workaday world of the city. He stood to one side, lonely, a sufferer and a seeker, learned and kindly, without falseness and full of zeal in the service of truth, but far removed from that noble and tender but unmistakable smile—he had no trace of mystery. The kindliness never forsook him, nor his cleverness, but he never disappeared in the magic cloud that surrounded my grandfather, his face never dissolved in that childlikeness and godlikeness whose interplay at times looked like sadness, at times like delicate mockery, at times like the silent, inward-looking mask of God. My father did not talk to my mother in Hindu languages, but spoke English and a pure, clear, beautiful German faintly colored with a Baltic accent. It was this German he used to attract and win me and instruct me; at times I strove to emulate him, full of admiration and zeal, all too much zeal, although I knew that my roots reached deeper into my mother's soil, into the dark-eyed and mysterious. My mother was full of music, my father was not, he could not sing.

  Along with me, sisters were growing up, and two older brothers, envied and admired. Around us was the little city, old and hunchbacked, and around it the forest-covered mountains, severe and somewhat dark, and through its midst flowed a beautiful river, curving and hesitant, and all this I loved and called home, and in the woods and river, I was well acquainted with the growing things and the soil, stones and caves, birds and squirrels, foxes and fishes. All this belonged to me, was mine, was home— but in addition there were the glass cabinet and the library and the kindly mockery in the omniscient face of my grandfather, and the dark, warm glance of my mother, and the turtles and idols, the Hindu songs and sayings, and these things spoke to me of a wider world, a greater homeland, a more ancient descent, a broader context. And high up in his wire cage sat our grave parrot, old and wise, with a scholar's face and a sharp beak, singing and talking, and he too came from afar, from the unknown, fluting the language of the jungles and smelling of the equator. Many worlds, many quarters of the earth, extended arms, sent forth rays which met and intersected in our house. And the house was big and old, with many partly empty rooms, with cellars and great resounding corridors that smelled of stone and coolness, and endless attics full of lumber and fruit and drafts and dark em
ptiness. Rays of light from many worlds intersected in this house. Here people prayed and read the Bible, here they studied and practiced Hindu philology, here much good music was played, here there was knowledge of Buddha and Lao-tse, guests came from many countries with the breath of strangeness and of foreignness on their clothes, with odd trunks of leather and of woven bark and the sound of strange tongues, the poor were fed here and holidays were celebrated, science and myth lived side by side. There was a grandmother, too, whom we rather feared and did not know very well because she spoke no German and read a French Bible. Complex and not understood by everyone was the life of this house, the play of light here was many-colored, rich and multitudinous were the sounds of life. It was beautiful and it pleased me, but more beautiful still was the world of my wishful thinking, richer still the play of my waking dreams. Reality was never enough, there was need of magic.

  Magic was native to our house and to my life. Besides the cabinets of my grandfather there were my mother's cabinets as well, full of Asiatic textiles, cloths, and veils. There was magic too in the leering glance of the idol, and mystery in the smell of many ancient rooms and winding stairways. And there was much inside me that corresponded to these externals. There were objects and connections that existed only within me and for me alone. Nothing was so mysterious, so incommunicable, so far removed from commonplace actuality as were these, and yet there was nothing more real. This was true even of the capricious comings and goings of the pictures and stories in that big book, and the transformations in the aspect of things which I saw occurring from hour to hour. How different was the look of our front door, the garden shed, and the street on a Sunday evening from on a Monday morning! What a completely different face the wall clock and the image of Christ in the living room wore on a day when Grandfather's spirit dominated than when my father's spirit did, and how very completely all this changed again in those hours when no one else's spirit but my own gave things their signature, when my soul played with things and bestowed on them new names and meanings! At such times a familiar chair or stool, a shadow beside the oven, the headline in a newspaper, could be beautiful or ugly and evil, significant or banal, could cause yearning or fear, laughter or sadness. How little there was that was fixed, stable, enduring! How alive everything was, undergoing transformation and longing for change, on the watch for dissolution and rebirth!

  PICO IYER

  (1957–)

  Pico Iyer was born to Indian parents in England and subsequently moved to America. He was educated in England and now lives in California and Japan. His first book, Video Nights in Kathmandu (1988), caught skillfully the opening moments of the vast and multifaceted process we have come to know as cultural globalization. In subsequent years, Iyer continued to report on the different ways in which Asian societies confronted and assimilated American pop culture. In The Lady and the Monk (1993) Iyer wrote about his own ambiguous journey to the East. In recent years, Iyer has attempted to describe the workings of what he calls “the global soul”: the rootless cosmopolitan who is denied the certainties and self-righteousness of exile by cheap air travel, and who is restlessly at home wherever he is. Iyer has written several travel essays on India. But few of them can match the subtle power of the following excerpt from his novel Abandon (2003). Iyer describes here a jaded English academic's journey to Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra, and invests these over-familiar sites of tourism with a sense of the uncanny and the mysterious.

  from ABANDON

  British Airways flies through the night to London, and then through another night to Delhi. When he arrived, in the dark of 1 a.m., there were figures coming toward him out of the mist, shrouded in blankets, only their eyes staring out through the phantasmal chill: “Sir, please, sir, come with me.” “Sir, best price for you.” It was always like a graveyard outside the international airport—he remembered even from his trip in college—and the number of figures had increased, moving without direction in the brown light, wrapped in turbans, their dark eyes sharp.

  He got into a broken-down Ambassador, some of the shawled figures getting in on all sides, turning around from the front to smile or gawk at him, scrambling into the backseat to sit beside him and guard his carry-on. As they drove into the spectral capital in the night—it was 2 a.m. now, local time—he felt as if he were moving through a battlefield at the end of some medieval war. Here and there, figures were sitting by small fires along the side of the road, their eyes wild as the headlights caught them, while others plodded along with bullocks in the middle of the half-deserted street. The air was brown, over everything a kind of filthy mist, and the buildings that came occasionally looming out of the dark, illuminated, looked more unreal than ever, like painted models. India had the one thing that California lacked, he realized—the theme of all his research coming back to him—native ghosts. Everywhere the sense of unseen and unburied spirits taking over the imperial city while the people slept.

  He took an early breakfast—one thing they still did well here— at a hotel Martine had told him about once, scribbled off a card to her, and then returned through the fog, less mysterious now the sun had risen, to catch the early flight to Jaipur. At the other end, pushing his way through the confusion of the small terminal, all the mystery and menace of the thronging crowds gone in the morning light, he found a man, impeccably got up in dark suit and tie, holding up a sign on which “Mr. MacMillane” had been written.

  The man led him farther out into the clamor, and opened the door to a grey Mercedes. Hussein was putting him up in a hotel near his house—his way of showing that he knew foreign tastes— and so they drove out into the town: huge billboards with large women spilling out of saris and men dancing around miniskirts, little stalls that looked like they'd been swept forty years ago toward a wastepaper basket they'd never quite reached, the commotion of cows and bicycles and ringing bells made many times worse by the sudden profusion of cars. In such a world, he thought, who wouldn't want to gather in secret at dead of night and take himself out of all this? The human impulse to escape would never go away: God has to be understood in the context of everything that is not Him.

  As they drew away from the town—the clangor and the big streets quickly fading—the driver put on a tape (another sign of Hussein's wish to be seen as sophisticated, or else just his habit of directing everything), and the blowing winds and uprising sands of desert music came up as they passed, almost instantly, into open spaces. Already the villages around them were nothing but mud-baked houses, children crowding over fires, the wind outside sending red and orange and green and blue scarves fleeting against their faces in the dust. Dark eyes watched the carriage from their fairy tales move past, beseeching, angry, startled, and soon even they were gone, and there was nothing but brown earth, brown walls, dry stone—an ancient space of almost atavistic emptiness.

  At last they came to a large driveway—he could have been in California, he thought, in Palm Springs or some other garish attempt to fill the empty space—and pulled up to a huge house, crumbling but clearly elegant. Hussein was waiting for him at the door (the driver having called ahead when they were two minutes away), and came out to greet him as if they were oldest friends. Talk, he recalled, was never difficult in India, especially for an Englishman people were eager to impress.

  He was led into an old-fashioned reception room—the stuff of Indian fantasy, he thought—and Hussein circled around the topic at hand, asking him about the flight, offering him a drink, so perfectly slipping into the part he had chosen to play that it became quite impossible to see him. He, too, had become arche-typal—the employer's prerogative—and every last urbanity seemed like another veil thrown up, or a kind of fog. He could no more be identified than the men looming up in the mist the evening before.

  “You must be exhausted,” he said in that Indian way that was more warning than commiseration. “And absolutely famished. Let me get you something to take the edge off your hunger before we have a look at the manuscript.” He was daring
him, he realized, to see him as cliché; in India, a man in a house like this would do everything possible to insist on his distance from the role, so as to lure his visitor into an assumption and then leave him at a disadvantage. The first prerogative of power is to do as it chooses and not even look at the rules it is breaking.

  “Of course I don't expect you to come to any decision right away. In fact, I wouldn't want you to; haste would be a kind of waste, don't you think? Besides, this is India.” Every sentence reminding him of where he stood and whom he was seeing. “But I'd like you to take just a peek at it. Before you return to your hotel. So you can think about what you have to work with.”

  They walked into a library—again, it looked like a Sherlock Holmes movie, with a huge spherical globe at the center and nineteenth-century editions covering all the shelves, a scattering of dust—and the man extracted a key and pulled something out from a desk. “Here, don't be shy,” his host offered, and he came around and found himself looking at a book like none he'd ever seen. A few Arabic characters were printed on the cover, framed by curlicues, and inside were pages upon pages of small script, written as tightly as a Quran. As in an illuminated manuscript from England, some characters were written in red, and gold had been used unsparingly.